AUBURN -- Roy Brown's little sister has posted an estimated 35,000 flyers proclaiming the innocence of her brother of murder since 1997.

Billie-Jo Kuczynski has pinned some of those flyers to the bulletin board in the Cayuga County Courthouse, the same place where she came with five more of Brown's relatives to witness Judge Peter Corning order the DNA testing of two cotton swabs taken from bite marks on Sabina Kulakowski's body.

Brown, currently held in the maximum-security Elmira Correctional Facility, was convicted of the brutal slaying of Kulakowski, a well-loved Cayuga County day care coordinator, after a six-day trial in January 1992.

Kuczynski came to Thursday's motion hearing. "He's my brother and he's locked up," Kuczynski said. "I want the world to know (his innocence)."

Brown's biological mother has passed away, but his stepfather, Bill Murphy, and Murphy's wife, Betty, were there as well. And Brown's 23-year-old daughter, April, was there with her fiance, David Lawton.

Brown's family has two hopes for the retesting of the cotton swabs with the DNA technique known as short tandem repeat (STR) testing: "The truth and the hope no one's finger is on the scale," Lawton said.

Brown made general appeals before to have items tested for DNA. Corning's 1995 denial relied on the report of a Monroe County Laboratory forensic chemist who said the samples of saliva were consumed while conducting a secretor blood group substance test, a test for blood type. No conclusive results were found from the test.

But since Brown's appeals, a 2004 revision to a state law formalized a legal procedure for convicts to have DNA testing completed that might exonerate them.

For the full report, read Friday's edition of The Citizen.